This Week in Fiction: Romesh Gunesekera

“Roadkill” comes from a series of stories you’re writing, which are told from the point of view of a taxi driver working in Sri Lanka in the years after the end of the civil war. What made you want to write about this place and time? And why through the eyes of a van driver?

I started writing the stories that have now become the book “Noontide Toll” because I wanted to explore a reality that seemed to me important and urgent. For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is in itself an act against the corrosiveness of time.

Art is forever trying to capture the fleeting moment, but this moment—post-war Sri Lanka—has an urgency that will not wait much longer. The past, the future, and even the present are unclear, but soon there will be a dominant narrative of these times, which will make it more difficult to remember those uncertainties. Some element of the material I am working with—memory and imagination—will no longer be there.

I also wanted to push the short story in a different way than I did in my earlier collection, “Monkfish Moon,” and to question how we define forms of fiction: short stories, novels, linked stories. This time I thought I’d use the unity of a single perspective—but one that develops and grows, story by story—to explore lives shaped by the pressures of a post-war situation.

Why Vasantha? He gave me the freedom to go where I needed to go and to meet the range of characters that I wanted to people the pages. Their stories become his story and the story of how we deal with the past, especially an uncomfortable, difficult past.

It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything, but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.

Miss Saraswati, the hotel manager Vasantha encounters in “Roadkill,” has spent her life at the epicenter of the civil war. She has a terrible scar on her neck and a callused trigger finger. She doesn’t talk about what has happened to her, but how do you imagine it?

I want you to meet Miss Saraswati as she is and piece together her story from what you know and what you assume, much as Vasantha does, and as we all do in such circumstances. I do have a clear idea of what she may have been through, but to say more would be to intrude too much.

Miss Saraswati says that, after a war, it is best not to ask about the past. Vasantha disagrees with her; he believes that it is crucial to know what has happened in order to avoid repeating mistakes. Do you sympathize more with one of the two characters?

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are. The politics of remembering is our frontline, or so it seems in many places. To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That’s why we have books, writing, fiction.

Much of what we learn about the civil war in this story is unspoken. Are most Sri Lankans, like Miss Saraswati, determined to move on and reluctant to address that time?

It very much depends on what effect the war had on the individual and his or her family. The toll from a long war is enormous, and the damage runs very deep beneath the surface of ordinary life. For those who have unanswered questions and personal traumas, moving on is not so easy. For others, there is the natural desire to get as much distance as possible from a bad time. And, for a few, those bad moments are tied up with guilt and complicity, as Vasantha observes, which may not let them move on.

What makes Vasantha different? Why is he so curious about the world, and about his countrymen?

He is on the road a lot. He has time to think. He meets a range of people and is often forced to test his assumptions and prejudices. If you are a reader, something similar happens as you embark on a book. Luckily, not everyone is asleep at the wheel.

Why did you choose the title “Roadkill” for this story? Is that dead rat in the hotel dining room symbolic of something larger?

Some things grow larger in the mind, especially in memory. Fiction needs to work with that. There is more than one animal killed in the story, and there are an untold number of human deaths that we are aware of in the area of the Spice Garden Inn. Even the random death of a roadkill will make any driver think, if only briefly, about deeper things. That was the effect I wanted for the reader, too: to stop and think. The killing of the rat is not random. So the “roadkill” here is something else.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.

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